Yet Another Reason We Don’t Use Cloudflare

It’s not been a long time since we last told you about why we don’t use Cloudflare. Our reasons still stand by the way, but since then there’s been a whole new change in the way that’s become a potential problem for the foreseeable future. Beyond just uptime and pricing, you now have to think about who gets to decide what content is allowed on your website.

When Your Website Answers to a Foreign Government

A major U.S. hosted site called Gelbooru recently ran into trouble with Cloudflare. The site was flagged by something called FSM-Hotline, a German non-profit but government-affiliated group that hunts for illegal content involving minors. According to Gelbooru, the flagged material in question was legal in both Germany and the United States on top of being protected by the First Amendment. Cloudflare’s response? They will only restore normal service after this German organization (not a government organization) personally confirms to them the content is indeed a false positive. Cloudflare didn’t bother checking it despite having read Gelbooru’s emails.

Let’s be clear about what this means. A business operating legally in the United States, following all local laws, now needs approval from a German non-profit to function normally online and has to wait for German bureaucracy to confirm they made a mistake. That’s not a hypothetical risk tech nerds warn you about. That’s happening right now.

Germany for better or worse, has some of the strictest content laws in the first world. They treat fictional content the same as illegal material. They’ve seized electronics permanently for social media posts that would be clearly protected speech here. Memes, jokes, political commentary, and yes, even certain types of artwork can trigger legal action there. That’s their societal choice, who are we to demand them to change to our preferences right?

The problem is that now those same standards are being applied to websites that have no physical or legal presence in Germany whatsoever.

Why This Matters for Your Business

If you run a business in Ohio or Ontario, you follow the laws of your state or province, and country along with any country you’re doing commerce with. That’s how business works. You shouldn’t have to hire an expert in German internet law just to keep your website running in America. You shouldn’t have to wonder if a joke on your blog, a meme in your documentation, or a piece of user-generated content might get your entire domain throttled because someone in Hamburg filed a complaint.

This isn’t about defending illegal content, we don’t host that stuff nor do we want you to. Everyone agrees that real illegal material should be removed immediately and handled through proper legal channels. However, this is about the creeping expansion of foreign jurisdiction into your business operations. Today it’s foreign non-profits wielding power under strict CSAM laws. Tomorrow it could be “disinformation” regulations, political speech restrictions, or whatever new content rules a foreign government decides to enforce. And who’s to say what’s completely reasonable and normal here doesn’t become illegal across the pond?

When you use Cloudflare, you’re supposed to be using a CDN with exceptional security. But suddenly you’re plugged into a global compliance machine that answers to non-profits in Brussels, Berlin, and beyond. Your website becomes subject to a patchwork of interpreted foreign laws, even though you’re a local business following local rules. That’s unnecessary vulnerability.

Digital Sovereignty Is Suddenly Uptime

We used to measure hosting quality by uptime percentages and page load speeds. Those still matter, but because of this decision there’s a new metric: digital sovereignty. Can your website stay online and accessible when you’re following the laws of your own country, or are you subject to the whims of foreign bureaucracy?

This issue connects directly to our core philosophy about decentralization. Centralized providers create single points of failure. Those failures used to be technical. Now they’re legal and jurisdictional because foreign governments can threaten massive fines. When your infrastructure routes through a handful of global companies, any government can lean on those companies to enforce its rules worldwide.

By using a mixture of global and independent providers along with maintaining control over our infrastructure stack, we ensure that no single foreign entity can hold your business hostage. If one provider decides to impose German law on your American website, we route around them. That’s real resilience. It’s not just about keeping your site online during outages or giving them the best speed. It’s about keeping your site online and under your control.

What This Means for You

Running a serious online business in North America means your website should stay up and accessible as long as you follow local laws. That’s the basic promise of hosting. That promise breaks down when your infrastructure provider starts enforcing foreign legal standards.

We’re not here to debate the ethics or what should be legal in America in the Gelbooru case. That’s up to you to decide, but the moment that you, a random individual have a say over whether or not what they’re doing is legal or not without authority or jurisdiction is when we all have a problem.

When you host with us you get peace of mind knowing that you can focus on their business, not the government overreach of the month. You know that we spend time we don’t have to in order to make sure your site’s uptime isn’t subject to the decisions of a foreign agency that doesn’t understand respect American or Canadian laws by having backups solutions we can switch to with the flip of a switch.

This matters whether you run a blog, an ecommerce store, a community forum, or any other online presence you’re serious about. The content you create, the discussions you host, and the community you build should answer to your local laws, not some governing body halfway on the other side of the planet who may or may not have made a mistake.

To Be Fair

It’s easy to dunk on the multinational company for not being perfect. Although we don’t use Cloudflare as our CDN, we do use a European-based CDN as out main high-speed delivery network for clients. The difference is that our infrastructure has a backup CDN which does not rely on any one jurisdiction and can be switched to at any time.

The reason we’re a better solution for resilience is not because we use a different company, it’s because we’ve set up our infrastructure so that it has a failover in case of any service outage or cancellation that doesn’t rely on any single company. If our European CDN were to shut you down for something unrelated to your local legality, we can simply switch you to our American CDN or even our private network. This is something that should come with every managed host but sadly doesn’t.

Closing Thoughts

The internet is changing. When we started out, speed and uptime was the first concern, and it remains important. But legal and jurisdictional resilience is now something you have to think about if your business has any chance of controversy. The same consolidation that made the web fragile teo systemic outages is also making it fragile legally.

Choosing independent infrastructure providers isn’t just about avoiding outages anymore. It’s about picking providers that preserve the principle that local businesses operate under local laws. It’s about ensuring that your website’s fate is decided by your community, not by bureaucrats thousands of miles away.

If you want hosting that keeps you online and free from foreign interference but can’t be bothered to do the research, we’re here. It’s not about being anti-big-tech. It’s about being pro-your-business and pro-common-sense.

If you wish to take a more resilient and less centralized way of hosting your site, give us a try or contact us for more information.